Pressure mounts on East Suffolk Council leader to resign over 'neglectful' recycling 'fiasco'

Ten weeks into the Better Recycling scheme, East Suffolk Council is facing its most direct challenge yet to its political leadership. Independent councillor Julia Ewart, who is also Suffolk County Council's Scrutiny Chair, has told Cllr Topping in writing that she has "completely lost confidence in the leadership of the Better Recycling rollout," and said that "those with overall responsibility for this failed rollout should now resign."

It is the sharpest escalation yet in a campaign that began in earnest on 16 July, when Cllr Ewart first wrote to chief executive Chris Bally proposing a "Transitional Cross-Party Administration" to replace the GLi Group Cabinet, which she said was "running out of road." She had separately written to the council's Monitoring Officer, citing a statutory duty to assess governance risk around the rollout.

Cllr Ewart's position has not softened since. Speaking to this publication, she said that she regarded the rollout as "without doubt one of the most neglectful, chaotic schemes I have ever experienced." She said sustained scrutiny from opposition councillors had forced the issue into the open and "brought this fiasco to a head." She described the administration's response to that scrutiny as marked by "such belligerence by those responsible failing to take ownership of the blame," adding that the result was that "residents' tolerance is so taken for granted."

Cllr Ewart is not alone among independent councillors in calling for change. Cllr Amanda Folley, town councillor at Felixstowe and district councillor for West Felixstowe, said a reshuffle of the Cabinet was overdue, pointing to Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) as her main concern: "It's ridiculous – if a cabinet can't cope with a bin rollout, how can they cope with LGR." She also described communication from the leader and Cabinet throughout the rollout as "poor."

Disputed figures

At the heart of the dispute is a disagreement over how the council is measuring its own performance and communicating it to Members and residents.

A weekly update circulated to councillors on 17 July recorded 270,093 planned collections, 224,557 completed, and 45,536 missed for the previous week, giving an overall collection rate of 83.1%. A subsequent update, covering the following week, no longer showed those underlying figures. Instead, councillors were given percentage averages by waste stream, alongside a revised figure stating that the previous week's average had in fact been 81.9%, rather than the 83.1% originally reported.

In a letter to Cllr Topping dated 27 July, seen by this publication, Cllr Ewart challenged the discrepancy: She said the change had "made meaningful comparison between weeks impossible" and created "an unfortunate perception that the Council is attempting to present the data in a more favourable light."

Cllr Ewart has also questioned a run of reported 100.0% collection rates for individual waste streams on individual days, writing that "across a district the size and geography of East Suffolk, multiple 100% collection days appear, at face value, highly unusual."

Sharing Cllr Ewart's views was Felixstowe Cllr Amanda Folley, who described the reporting as "a disgrace." Her central concern echoes Cllr Ewart's, but from a different angle: she said a number of properties are not included on round lists at all, meaning that any missed collections at those addresses would not register in the figures as a missed collection. She was clear, however, that she did not know how many properties this might affect.

In response, Deputy Leader, Cllr Paul Ashton, said the weekly updates were never intended to be formal reports, bound by a determined methodology. "They are information packs which provide Councillors with insight about the things we are doing," he said, adding that "different information may be useful in future weeks, which we will provide for Councillors." He said the presumption was that councillors would raise any concerns about what was shared directly with the council, and that "this has worked well so far."

He also confirmed the council intends to publish bin counts by waste type in future weekly updates, saying: "I want to share the counts of bins for each waste type in reports to Councillors because I think it will be more meaningful and helpful than daily totals."

A further, more technical concern has emerged over what the reported figures actually capture.

In a letter to Cllr Ashton, seen by this publication, Cllr Ewart set out a distinction she said had not previously been made clear to Members: the difference between an "incomplete round," where the council already knows a property has not been visited, and a "missed bin," which the council only becomes aware of once a resident reports it. She argued that this means a round can be recorded as fully complete while individual missed collections still exist within it, writing that "a '100% completed round' is not necessarily equivalent to '100% successful collections'."

She has asked the council for clear definitions of its principal performance measures, including completed rounds, incomplete rounds, missed bins, recovered collections, and failed collections, and whether any process exists to check in-cab driver data against residents' actual experience.

Cllr Ashton's response goes some way to confirming the distinction Cllr Ewart has raised. He said the percentages generated from the in-cab system are "round completion rates," where 100% means a crew completed its whole round, not that every individual bin on it was collected. "We know a 100% round completion rate doesn't guarantee every bin is collected, but we are using the data for week-on-week comparisons rather than as an absolute measure," he said. He added that, even with a highly diligent workforce, the sheer volume of collections makes some misses statistically inevitable: "We collect roughly 270,000 bins each week. Even if we complete every round and we are 99.9% accurate with our collection, that still leads to 270 missed bins per week."

General waste mixed with recyclables 'very limited'

On the question of where collected waste ends up, Cllr Ashton confirmed that bins from a small number of severely affected properties have, on occasion, been collected together and treated as general waste rather than sorted.

"There have been some residents who have experienced repeated missed collections of many bins," he said. "In order to get these residents to a clean start, we have, by exception, just for them, collected all their bins at the same time and processed the contents as general waste. Thereafter, we have collected their waste in segregated streams."

He stressed that the practice had been "very limited" – in the hundreds or tens of collections – and did not reflect council policy, which remains to collect waste in segregated streams, adding that the council's overall recycling rate "improved by almost ten percentage points in June compared to previous months."

The leadership challenge

At a Full Council meeting on 22 July, Deputy leader Cllr Ashton gave a lengthy and candid account of the operational problems behind the rollout, including vehicle faults, driver shortages and weight-calibration issues, and confirmed the appointment of an outside specialist to help recover the service. Cllr Topping followed with her own apology, albeit much shorter than that of her deputy, who has been left to deal with the fallout of the troubled rollout almost singlehandedly.

Responding to this publication, Cllr Topping strongly rejected any suggestion that she should stand down. "I am committed to ensuring that we deliver further improvements to the waste collection service, and I am getting no indications from other political groups that they have any wish for me to stand down as Leader," she said. "Political grandstanding is of no interest to residents whose primary concern is receiving consistent services."

Cllr Topping said councillors "from across the political spectrum" were right to challenge and scrutinise waste and recycling services, but added that "constructive dialogue is preferable to social media posturing." She said she looked forward to hearing from Cllr Ewart "about the rescheduling of our meeting, which she chose to cancel four weeks ago."

Cllr Ashton was similarly dismissive of the specific route Cllr Ewart has taken. He said her original approach to the council's chief executive, rather than to fellow group leaders, was the equivalent, in national terms, of an independent MP asking the head of the civil service to remove the prime minister and cabinet, and assist that independent MP in putting in place an alternative prime minister and cabinet more to the liking of that MP. He said no discussion had taken place with the leaders of the Labour or Conservative groups before that approach was made, and that he could not see how changing the cabinet or leader is going to have the "remotest impact" on the operation of the waste collection service."

Asked what should happen next, Cllr Ewart repeated her call for a change in the council's leadership: "Residents will rightly ask what's next? The answer should be a cross-party 'cabinet of unity' to ease East Suffolk's legacy through the Local Government Reorganisation process, I'm incredibly clear on that. This rollout is a critical failure by East Suffolk Council – I believe there are others."

Cllr Folley's view was similarly unambiguous: whatever form it takes, she believes change at the top of the council is now overdue. She describes a Cabinet that is "imploding," with infighting between Greens and Lib Dems commonplace – though Ashton "refutes" that claim, saying: "The cabinet meets most weeks to discuss current issues and to focus on one or two upcoming changes that Cabinet members are working on. We actually met earlier this [yesterday] afternoon. The discussion was cordial and constructive.

"In previous meetings, there have been occasional differences of opinion, but nothing I would characterise as arguing."

The bottom line

East Suffolk Council says performance on Better Recycling is improving, and has now set out, in detail, why its weekly figures work the way they do: informal updates rather than fixed reports, round completion rather than a guarantee every bin is collected, and a small, exceptional use of combined collections for the worst-affected properties. It says that all major issues have been ironed out and that consistency is key.

Leader Cllr Topping insists she has no plans to stand down. Deputy Leader Cllr Ashton says that this is an operational issue, not a political one. But with a growing number of opposition councillors now publicly and privately pushing for change, pressure is mounting on the council's leadership to quickly resolve the remaining Better Recycling shortcomings and prove to both opposition councillors and residents that they are the right people to lead East Suffolk into Local Government Reorganisation.

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